Debian Weekly News - February 6th, 2002

Welcome to the sixth issue of 2002's series of DWN, the weekly
newsletter for the Debian community. The feedback we received after we tried
another mail format, was overwhelming and mostly appreciating the new format.
I guess, we will keep it. Not directly affecting Debian, a heated debate is
going on in Germany, discussing whether Free Software (i.e. GNU/Linux) should be used by the
parliament or not.

Preparing the Next Stable Revision. In another quixotic
attempt, Joey is preparing another revision of the stable Debian distribution (r6) and will
infrequently send reports so people can actually comment on it and intervene whenever this
is required. As usual the next stable revision will mainly add new security
fixes.

Problem with Donations. Martin Krafft started a discussion
about donating money (and equipment) to the Debian project. He pointed out
that it is rather difficult to donate money to the Debian project if you're
not living in the U.S. or in Germany. A PayPal account could help here, but there are horror stories out there as well, and
it seems difficult to reach a human being in case of trouble. Additionally,
individuals could act as relay, but only donations to charitable organizations
are tax-deductible.

Fixing Packages in Testing. Robert McQueen and Jonathan
McDowell wrote a proposal
that talks about woody-proposed-updates. Fixing bugs in testing
can be problematic if the current version in unstable is a new upstream
release or is linked against newer libraries that prevents their inclusion in
testing until the package is considered ready. This dual-feed approach to
testing should bring us much closer to the ideal of having a testing that
remains bug-free and current enough.

Installing Debian Packages on AIX. IBM is distributing
free software tools for its AIX platform packaged as RPM files. This is
disappointing for people who used to work on Debian, especially if it comes to
source modifications and package rebuilding. Hence, several people are interested
in porting dpkg to AIX as well, in order to be able to install
Debian packages there.

Bugs That Require Help. Martin Michlmayr reports that the QA web site now features listings of bugs
tagged help, security and unreproducible.
People who care about the woody release should take some time and go help with
those bugs. Developers who would like to know how to tag bug reports against
packages they maintain, should read the
documentation.

Loki Games Inc. Goes Out of Business. Many users and
developers of GNU/Linux, who use their system for playing games, feel sad
about Loki's
demise. However, some projects and the CVS repository of Loki will last.
This should be a general reminder, that we should not pirate software, which
may lead to their companies going out business. Frankly to say, one of
reasons that many people show their back to GNU/Linux is the lack of many
games and support.

LSB 1.1 Released. On February 1st 2002 it was reported
that Linux
Standard Base 1.1 (LSB) was released together with the first version of
the Linux Internationalization Initiative
Standard to deal with GNU/Linux language barriers. This project tries to
assure users that their choice of GNU/Linux will be supported across vendors
as well as across hardware platforms. It will be very useful for breaking the
barrier among many GNU/Linux distributions including Debian GNU/Linux which
sponsors mailing lists for
this LSB project.

Successful Booth at LWCENY. Jaldhar Vyas, who organized
the Debian booth at the past LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in New York City,
wrote a summary after the show. Twelve people from Debian showed up at the booth.
At the booth, they got machines of several architectures (sparc, mips, alpha,
and parisc) running which most visitors found quite impressive.

Status of Debian Jr. Ben Armstrong sent in a status report for Debian Jr. It has been a while since Ben Armstrong
reported on how Debian Jr. is developing. A number of improvements have been
made to the Debian Jr. web
site to give people a better idea of what they have accomplished. Since
nobody has stepped forward to work on Debian in education, Debian Jr. has
taken membership in the newly formed Schoolforge coalition, a group of "independent organisations that
advocate, use and develop open resources for primary and secondary
education".

Updating Outdated Netscape Packages. Diego Biurrun, who
wrote the article on DebianPlanet that we commented on in our last issue, sent us an
update. The maintainer for our Netscape packages, Ryan Murray, was waiting
for CJK translations, is working on 4.79 packages and hopes to finish them
soon. Diego has started doing some productive work and helped Ryan Murray
by sifting through the bug lists and weeding out around 90 outdated
and/or unreproducible bugs, merging a few and assigning to other
packages if they did not belong to Netscape.

New Boot-Floppies 3.0.19? New boot-floppies are about to be
released soon. The current version 3.0.18 was released on December 18 and an
impressive number of changes were made to the current code in CVS. It's time
to let people test the system. One outstanding issue, however, that may hold
this release, is the pending non-maintainer upload of slang1-utf8.

Updated XFree86 Packages for Potato. Charl P. Botha announced new
potato packages of Branden's official 4.1.0-13 release. People who are still
running Debian 2.2 (potato) and want to use these newer X packages, should
read this
before upgrading.

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following packages were
added to the Debian archive recently.